Like many other American-born Muslims, I have much to be thankful for at this time of the year, and always. Alhamdullilah. One of those is the ability and unique opportunity to share what I love to do and spend my time working in that capacity. After teaching middle and high school for nearly ten years, I reached a decision to transfer my passion for wholesome food, nutrition, and cooking into a full-time profession as a personal chef, food writer and culinary educator. In the fall of 2008, the result of my love affair with all things culinary gave birth to the blog, My Halal Kitchen.

About My Halal Kitchen

Born in the U.S. to Sicilian and Puerto-Rican parents, I grew up eating extraordinarily delicious and ethnically diverse foods: lasagna, homemade pizzas and fresh breads, tamales, rice and beans, fried plantains…just to name a few. My taste buds were awakened at such a young age and afforded me the desire to expand those food explorations to just about any cultural food expedition possible.
When I married and moved to live with my Mexican/Italian husband in Chicago, I embarked on another culinary journey that would expose me to another side of Latin food and the foods made famous by Chicago (i.e. deep dish pizzas, kielbasas and Italian beef sandwiches), only this time I had to pick out only what was halal to eat. As a result, we scoped out ways to eat our favorite foods and try a few other along the way, as long as that food was sure to be halal. This wasn’t always so easy… or budget friendly.

Culinary Rebirth

I then tried fervently to educate myself on food sources, vendors and all the technical terminology I needed to know so that we could avoid consuming anything impermissible, but also so that we could enjoy our favorite traditional and ethnic foods- with halal substitutions, at home. Although I’d been cooking since I was a young girl, I now decided to master the classic recipes- chicken Parmesan, beef tacos and veal stew. They weren’t on the menu of a single halal restaurant we could find, but we could now eat it at home.
When I felt ready to share this build-up of culinary know-how, I decided to create the blog as a platform to share with readers (Muslim or not) the tasty recipes I’d been fortunate enough to gather from my family and friends around the globe and close to home. I also wanted to share kitchen tips, travel stories, my thoughts and knowledge about food and cooking, and where readers could find all the same things I did to create my halal meals.

Hunting For Healthy, Halal Foods

For the readers of My Halal Kitchen, I also gathered a small collection of trusted companies and stores that offer not only halal products, but also healthy, halal-certified products. This has proven to be a challenge when it comes to things like sausages or veal meat because not only are they rare fare finds at halal restaurants, but few grocers provide a large variety of specialized meat cuts and/or deli meats from which to buy and make the dishes ourselves at home. The few I do find, I hold dearly and frequent them as much as possible.
As a home cook, I tend to avoid using as much pre-packaged and low quality food items as possible and quickly gained the desire to make more foods from scratch, simply because it guarantees the makeup of ingredients. The result has been simply delicious, purely enjoyable and simply… halal.

Nourish The Body, Nourish The Soul

My hope is that all readers (from sixty four countries and growing!) will benefit from the display of delicious halal recipes and culinary tips as well as be inspired by the travel stories that encourage individuals to find out where our food grows, to get in touch with the land that our Lord has given us and to understand and appreciate what a miraculous, nourishing gift every natural food product is for us.
Being thankful to Allah is a never-ending duty on the part of the Muslim. The Qur’anic surah that profoundly reminds me of this is Surah Rahman as it repeats this beautiful phrase throughout:

“Fabi-ayyi ala-i rabbikuma tukaththiban (Then which of the Blessings of your Lord will you both (jinns and men) deny?)”

I don’t want to deny any of the goodness my Lord gave me, and alhamdullilah, cooking and sharing the gift of knowledge surrounding this topic helps me to do just that. Insha’allah…